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Mandarin: Year 3.7 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Language Learning Log |  | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes  Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 49 of 111 23 June 2013 at 6:54am | IP Logged |
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First three units of Module One down. OK, I like this FSI thing. It is making my brain hurt, but in a good way. I
could probably stand to do the unit 2 and 3 drills again - that's how badly I am able to formulate my sentences in time to respond to the Tape Lady - but yeah, this seems exactly like what I need right now. And it's kinda fun, the voice of Tape Lady is oddly soothing and I printed out a copy of the whole course diagram and cross off the parts I do with a big pen when I do them. I still have no idea how this would work out for a complete beginner... but I do remember the pronunciation modules were the only explanations of the sh and x differences that really made sense to me back when I looked at those, like, two years ago. And randomly today I was talking to some relatives and got multiple genuine compliments from different people on my pronunciation of my few conversational contributions so I can preen a little bit about that. I just wish I could think faster on my feet. Taking 15 seconds to come up with a particular noun doesn't really keep the conversation going. I really feel like I'm shaping up like one of those kids that never talks but then one day bursts out in complete sentences at the dining table. One day! 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 50 of 111 02 July 2013 at 3:18am | IP Logged |
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Vacation is over now. It was good to get lots of encouragement from relatives, but it's hard to keep up on stuff with all the various visits & excursions. I'm caught up on Anki reviews and did get to add a couple of batches of MMO words, but I'm only halfway through Unit 4 of the FSI (it was not as easy to listen to on the long plane rides as I hoped, oh well). I did discover that if I am at all sleepy, it is a grand way to knock myself out.
Anyway, will wrap up Unit 4 today or tomorrow and then it is on to MODULE TWO: BIOGRAPHY. I must again say that this thing is much easier when I already know all the words. I'm not sure how anyone could get through this from scratch, though I'm sure many must have. FSI Language School = serious business, apparently. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 51 of 111 02 July 2013 at 3:32am | IP Logged |
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Oh, I almost forgot, I've been doing good with listening. Partway through vacation my wife and I started watching this TV show on my laptop that I recorded a while back off of ICN. They call it NEW PRINCESS DESTINATION, the words in the corner of the screen call it SWALLOW'S LIFE, and the real name is apparently 新还珠格格 (New Returning Princess).
It's a period show and supposed to be somewhat comedic and it is just doofy enough to keep our interest (we're on episode 13 or so). English subs only, so though I can't doublecheck their talking with characters I can at least follow the plot, such as it is. Anyway, we've been watching 2-3 episodes of this thing a day so that's like 1.5 hours of listening, hooray! Show Info Some more research tells me this series is a remake, and the original was better though of, and all serious and stuff, but honestly at this level I kinda prefer the wacky hijinx. I do have a limit on longing glances and hushed whispers. 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 52 of 111 06 July 2013 at 8:38pm | IP Logged |
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Up to episode 17 of Swallow's Life, and I kinda need a show of my own now that my wife is so attached to this one, lawl. Well, we'll finish it eventually together.
Just started MODULE TWO of FSI, finished all the pre-req stuff with dates & classroom stuff, and again FSI comes through with explaining something that nobody else did - the days of the week, which my wife's family says as libai and all previous stuff said were xingqi or zhou. Another random mystery sort of solved - libai is just a little older-style. Hooray for 1979. I also made a big spreadsheet list of all the various tapes in FSI so I can check them off easily and put a date there to make sure I'm maintaining the pace on them and, uh, holy crap, there are like 300. So, yeah, I better ramp up the speed of these things and do 2-4 tapes per day so I can finish in a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully there won't be a big trainwreck when I hit the more advanced stuff, but I know so many words now that I think (hope, really) it might all be just a different thing I'm training here - listening/speaking - and maybe the tapes will remain the same difficulty the whole time. But just in case I am horribly wrong about that, I should really get all these early ones knocked out quickly. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 53 of 111 10 July 2013 at 10:56pm | IP Logged |
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Finished Unit 1 of MODULE TWO, halfway through Unit 2 and haven't done it yet today, so my 2-4 tapes a day pace is keeping up. I am already getting better at making up my own sentences, so FSI is very encouraging, and I actually don't find it boring or silly at all even if it's old. The sound quality on some of the latest tapes is pretty bad, but since I know the words I know what to listen for, so it's ok. The only new words so far have been stuff like Major (the rank) and Military Attache's Office. Oh, and a bunch of province/city names, but I need to learn those anyway to ever make sense of news broadcasts, so into the Anki they went.
Up to episode 23 of Swallow's Life. One of the latest episodes was basically entirely about the (ahem) palace-wide diarrhea caused by the evil emperor's wife (the wife is evil, not the emperor), who was try to make Xiao Yanzi look bad by poisoning her dumplings. Ah, cultural differences. Anyway, I also discovered these are up for the internet-at-large on a new website I found, viki.com. Basically it has community-created subtitles for stuff on Youtube. Looks like they have lots of shows too, but more importantly for my purposes, their created subtitles are offscreen and the original Hanzi subtitles are thus still visible (they're blurred out on the broadcast I get). Swallow's Life on viki.com Lots of other languages/shows, too, it seems pretty neat. Edited by proudft on 10 July 2013 at 10:58pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 54 of 111 13 July 2013 at 8:15pm | IP Logged |
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Halfway through Unit 4. These P2 tapes are HARD. I will probably have to do many of them multiple times. At least they're fairly short.
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| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 55 of 111 27 July 2013 at 8:26pm | IP Logged |
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Got super busy with stuff, but back on the wagon the last couple of days and now halfway through Unit 5.
We also finished up Swallow's Life (the first season anyway). I think it was really helping my listening comprehension, so we started up a new show (and helpfully most of our usual TV shows are in reruns). For the potential new show we watched the first episode of something ICN calls Men but the real name is 男人帮 (nan ren bang). So far it seems basically like Sex in the City but with male protagonists. There were some funny moments and the main guy so far has a super low and mumbly voice - good practice to listen to! Looks like it's also on Youtube here, but chinese subs only: Nan Ren Bang Edited by proudft on 27 July 2013 at 8:32pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| proudft Senior Member United States Joined 5154 days ago 124 posts - 156 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Mandarin | Message 56 of 111 31 July 2013 at 3:03am | IP Logged |
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Finally finished Unit 5, on to Unit 6. Whee! That sure was a lot of numbers with all the ages and dates. I had to do lots of pausing for my reciting of them, I am much slower than the time they allot you.
Turns out Men was not as popular with my wife as with me, so we watched the first episode of another thing I recorded off ICN a while back: Legend. Some wacky mythological thing with people & gods jumping all over the place. That wasn't a big hit either (plus I'm missing a couple episodes), so we watched the first episode of Startling Step by Step on viki.com last night. This one is some 'modern girl gets transported back to 1600s' thing but it was apparently entertaining enough so far. We'll see - I clearly have much lower standards for my Chinese TV compared to my wife. :) 1 person has voted this message useful |
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